Astraptes audax, A. augeas, A. fruticibus,
A. inflatio, A. procrastinator, A. synecdoche Brower 2010
(skipper butterflies) DNA barcoding is a controversial method for
distinguishing otherwise similar species solely on the basis of their
DNA. These names reflect aspects of DNA barcoding for species
recognition:
augeas for the resultant labor implied by the
barcoding;
fruticibus ("from the bushes") refers to the fact
that resulting species do not form distinct tree-like groups;
inflatio for the large number of resulting species;
procrastinator for the time elapsed between
discovery and description;
synecdoche for a part standing for the whole;
audax means 'bold'; its relevance is left to the
reader.
The author of these names (and four others), though skeptical of their
biological reality, notes that the distinctions exist in the
literature, and the names are given for "taxonomic housekeeping."
[Syst. Biodivers. 8: 485]

Centropyge narcosis Pyle & Randall
(narc angelfish) Dr. Richard Pyle was diving deep while breathing air.
This causes nitrogen narcosis, a state similar to alcohol intoxication
or nitrous oxide inhalation. Back at the dive boat, he was asked if
he collected anything, and he said "No, nothing." But when he looked
into his collecting bucket, he noticed that he had indeed collected
several specimens of this new species. Since his narcosis level was
so high that he did not remember collecting them, the fish was named
C. narcosis.

Chionoecetes oiliqo (Saatuaq crab) In 1993,
Greenland issued a 7.25-krone stamp showing a picture of a crab and this
scientific name. However, the crab's correct species name is
C. opilio; the stamp was printed with a mirror reversal of the
specific epithet. A corrected stamp was printed soon after.

Coelopleurus exquisitus Coppard & Schultz,
2006 (sea urchin) This species first came to notice after being
listed for auction on eBay. Marine biologist Simon Coppard was
directed to the site, did not recognize the species, and investigated
further. Immediately after publication of the description
[Zootaxa 7], the value of specimens on eBay jumped from $8 to
$138.

Edithinella doliarius Janssen 2006 (fossil
gastropod) Arie Janssen wanted to dedicate a new mollusc species
to Pisidium (freshwater clam) expert Hans Kuiper. Not having a
classical education, he relied on a Dutch-Latin dictionary to find a
Latin equivalent of "Kuiper" ("Cooper" in English), and named the
species Edithinella calumniator. To improve his English
writing, he then sent the manuscript to a colleague, who commented,
"But why do you call him an intriguer?" "Kuiper" has two meanings in
Dutch, and Janssen had unwittingly chosen the Latin term for the wrong
one. Fortunately, he discovered it before publication, and revised to
the name to E. doliarius, which is the correct Latin for the
cooper profession. [Basteria, suppl. 3, 45-48.]

Esemephe Steiner, 1980 (darkling beetle) On
an expedition to the Andes concentrating on looking for potential
control agents for Mexican bean beetles, one of the botanists used the
exclamation, "Shit, man, f***!" whenever anything went wrong. He did
this so often that the trip came to be known among its members as the
SMF Expedition. Steiner discovered this new species of beetle on that
expedition and realized that the spelled-out acronym contained parts
of two Greek words that applied to the beetle. The published
etymology says, "a neologism (gender feminine) derived from two Greek
words, essymenos (hurrying or eager), in reference to behavior,
and ephestris (mantle or outer garment), in reference to the
flattened, expanded flange that encircles the body."
[Proc. Entomol. Soc. Wash. 82: 388] But now you know the full
story.

Gazella granti roosevelti (Roosevelt's
gazelle),

Hippotragus niger rooseveltien (Roosevelt's
sable antelope; extremely rare, last legally shot in 1912)
On the 21 April 1909, Teddy Roosevelt's safari set off from Mombasa,
Kenya. By the time the entourage arrived in Khartoum 8 months later,
they had slaughtered 5,013 mammals, 4,453 birds, 2,322 reptiles and
amphibians and similar numbers of fish, invertebrates, shells, and
plants. The skins, etc. were sent to the Smithsonian; among these were
Roosevelt's gazelle and Roosevelt's sable.

hectocotylus Some male cephalopods have a long
coiled arm which carries a spermatophore and breaks off inside the
female during copulation. When first discovered, it was thought that
this arm was a type of parasitic worm, and it was described as such
(Delle Chiaje, 1825), complete with drawings of the imagined internal
anatomy. The author later admitted his mistake. This name continues to
be used today for the modified reproductive arm of male
cephalopods.

Heikea japonica von Siebold, 1824 (crab)
The carapace of these crabs looks like the scowling face of a samurai
warrior, and it is locally believed that the crabs are reincarnations
of the spirits of the Heike warriors who, defeated in battle, threw
themselves into the sea, as told in The Tale of the Heike.
Some scientific folklore gives these crabs as an example of natural
selection, as Japanese fishermen supposedly released the crabs with
the most human-looking faces, allowing them to pass their genes to the
next generation. This story, however, is almost certainly urban
legend. The crabs are too small to interest fishermen, and other
crabs far from fisheries also have human-looking faces. The pattern
on the crab is instead an example of pareidolia, the tendency for the
human brain to see faces in many abstract patterns.

Hildoceras Hyatt, 1876 (Jurassic ammonoid)
According to legend, Saint Hilda was told to found an Abbey on the
plains of Whitby, England, but she found the place infested with
snakes. After her prayers, the snakes coiled up and turned to stones,
becoming the ammonoid fossils, sometimes called snakestones, that are
common to the area. Victorian fossil dealers would often carve a
snake's heads on the fossils.

Homo floresiensis Brown et al., 2004
("Hobbit" fossil hominin) The name submitted in the original paper
was Sundanthropus floresianus, "man from Sunda region from
Flores". The referees, though, said it should be genus Homo,
and one of them said floresianus actually means "flowery anus",
so that had to change, too.

Jumala Friele, 1882 (whelk) Friele proposed
this name thinking it was the name of an old Lapp deity. He
discovered about ten years later that it was instead the Lapp name for
the Christian God and proposed that Ukko (the Finnish god of
winds) be substituted. Jumala, however, had priority. Joshua
Baily and Myra Keen, in 1955, appealed to the ICZN to suppress
Jumala, as the name is "calculated to give offense on
religious grounds." The Commission suppressed it by 13 to 11
vote. [Ng, 1994, Raffles Bull. Zool. 42: 511.]

Kryoryctes cadburyi 2005 (Cretaceous mammal)
Tim Rich, leading a dinosaur dig at Dinosaur Cove, Australia, offered a
reward of a kilo of chocolate for a particularly good fossil. (The
other food on the expedition was terrible.) But evidence of mammals
among dinosaurs in Australia is even rarer. Asked what finding a mammal
fossil would merit, Tim answered a cubic meter of chocolate. One of the
undescribed bones from that dig, when eventually examined closely,
turned out to be from a mammal. Tim was dismayed by the price of a ton
of chocolate, but the local Cadbury factory offered to make good on the
bet. Since the individual who discovered the bone was by then unknown,
the whole team was invited. Making chocolate in a cubic meter piece is
impossible, but Cadbury made a cubic meter of cocoa butter and then let
the people loose in a room full of chocolate bars. (Kryoryctes means
"cold digger", referring to the polar latitude where the creature died
104 million years ago, and the fact that the animal was adapted for
digging.)

Laniarius liberatus (Bulo Burti boubou)
This is the first bird whose type specimen is a DNA sample. The bird
was released to the wild after capture, hence the name. It turns out
to be a very rare color morph of L. erlangeri.

Leptocephalus "Leptocephalus" is a term
originally applied to a group of small, flattened, semitransparent
fishes, often with small heads. They were classified as a distinct
group, usually in the genus Leptocephalus, until the mid-19th
century. Then the idea took hold that leptocephali were larvae of
something else. In 1864, Theodore Gill suggested that they were larval
eels, and specifically that Leptocephalus morrisii was the young
of Conger conger, the conger eel. Other leptocephali raised in
an aquarium metamorphosed into eels; Leptocehalus brevirostris
became Anguilla anguilla, the freshwater eel.

Limodorum Boehm. (orchid) Thought to derive
from a transcription error. Originally named Haimodorum (from haemos,
blood) for its red color, somebody forgot the bar in the Greek letter
Α, leaving Λ, lambda.

Lycosa tarentula (European wolf spider)
Tarantism was a form of hysteria that appeared in Italy in the 15th-17th
centuries and took the form of frenzied dancing. In folk belief, the
bite of a spider could only be cured by such dancing. The name derives
from the Italian province Taranto, as does the tarantella, a folk dance,
and the tarantula, the common name given to the European wolf spider and
later to the distantly related large, hairy spiders of the family
Theraphosidae.

Lymantria dispar Leopold Trouvelto, looking
for a better silkworm (Bombyx mori), looked for a close relative
and imported Bombyx dispar into the United States. But it turned
out that the moths were not very closely related; B. dispar is
classified as Lymantria dispar today. "Lymantria" means
"destroyer." Trouvelto's moths, commonly known as gypsy moths, escaped
and have been causing untold damage to Eastern forests ever
since.

Malania anjouanae Smith, 1953. The second
specimen of coelacanth was caught 20 December 1952 off the Comoros
Islands. As this specimen had only one dorsal fin, J.L.B. Smith, the
describer of the first coelacanth in 1938 (Latimeria), placed it
in a new genus Malania. This was in honor of Dr. Daniel Francois
Malan, the South African Prime Minister, who sent Smith (accompanied by
the S.A. air force) in a military Dakota plane to the Comoros (then a
French colony) to retrieve the precious fish. South Africa received
fantastic publicity worldwide and great prestige in the scientific
world. The French government was outraged and declared an international
embargo on the coelacanth. The coelacanth was thought at the time to be
an ancestor of tetrapods. This specimen was found by Black African
fisherman Ahmed Hussein. Ironically, it was named for a man who was an
ardent Creationist and the father of the South African white supremacist
policy of apartheid. Dr. Malans' reaction upon seeing his namesake, the
most spectacular biological find of the 20th century, was, "Why it's
ugly! Is this where we come from?" Malania has since been
synonomized with Latimeria; the single dorsal fin has been
determined to be the result of an injury that the fish sustained while
young.

Mammuthus Brookes, 1828 (mammoth) According to a folk
etymology (the word's true origins are obscure), "Mammoth" comes, via
Russian, from the Estonian maa (earth) and mutt (mole).
There is a widespread belief, principly among the Siberians and Inuit,
that the woolly mammoth fossils (including some preserved mostly
intact in permafrost) were the remains of gigantic burrowing animals
which died upon exposure to sun- or moonlight. This also explained
why no one ever saw one alive. Remarkably, this myth is still extant
today. Some people immediately destroy the invaluable remains upon
discovery, as they are thought to bring bad luck.

Neduba extincta Rentz, 1977 (Antioch Dunes
shieldback katydid) In the 1960's, Dave Rentz was revising the
Dectininae crickets when he came across a specimen of an apparently new
species of the Neduba genus that had lain unidentified in a museums
collections since the late 1930's. Its large size, differently shaped
pronotum, and other characteristics were unique. Despite several large
scale field excursions to California's Antioch Dunes (which have been
largely blown and hauled away) it has never again been recorded. Rentz
pronounced it gone and named it 'extincta'.
(photo) [Rentz, D.C.F.,
1977. A new and apparently extinct katydid from Antioch sand dunes,
Entomological News 88:241-245.]

Neoceratodus forsteri Krefft, 1870
(Queensland lungfish) The "Burnett Salmon" was well-known as a food fish
in the 1800's. Its importance to science was only recognised when the
then Australian Museum Director Gerard Krefft saw a specimen being
prepared for a friend's dinner. Krefft noticed the strange internal
organs including the presence of a single lung. This suggested that the
lungfish could be the 'missing link' between fishes and amphibians.
(Indeed, Krefft considered it an amphibian in its original description
[Proceedings of the Scientific Meetings of the Biological Society
of London 1870: 221].)
Krefft formally named the species after his friend, William Forster,
whose dinner it was originally intended for.

Noronhomys vespuccii Carleton & Olson, 1999 (fossil
rat). In 1503 the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci, for whom the
Americas are named, explored the island of Fernando de Noronha, off the
coast of Brazil. In his Lettera di Amerigo Vespucci delle isole
nuovamente in quattro suoi viaggi, Vespucci mentions some "very big
rats" as living there. Later explorers found no native
mammals on the island, and as Vespucci was the first European to reach
Fernando de Noronha, they could not have been European rats. In 1973,
Carleton and Olson found fossils of a large previously undescribed
rodent. They named the species after Vespucci because his
Lettera was the only document "suggesting the existence of an
indigenous rodent on the island." Vespucci's rat would have been the
only native land mammal of the archipelago. Ironically, three exotic
European rodents, the roof rat, the house mouse, and the rock cavy,
currently thrive on Fernando de Noronha. [Carleton and Olson, 1999.
Amerigo Vespucci and the rat of Fernando de Noronha: a new genus and
species of Rodentia (Muridae : Sigmodontinae) from a volcanic island off
Brazil's continental shelf. American Museum Novitates n 3256:
1-59.]

Papaipema pterisii Bird, 1907 (moth) The
moth lives on bracken fern, in the genus Pteris at the time, so
people assumed Bird named the moth after the fern. A personal letter he
wrote later, though, revealed that it was named after Pterisius, his
pet cat.

Phoenicophorium borsigianum Koch 1855 (thief
palm). The original plant was stolen from London's Kew Gardens (hence
the common name) and turned up in the private palm-house of amateur
horticulturist August Borsig of Berlin. (He owned an ironworks factory
and used the heat produced to keep his glasshouses warm.) David
L. Jones, in Palms throughout the World (1995) confuses the story
by calling Borsig by the name "Lantanier Feuille Borsig"; Lantanier
Feuille is actually one of the palm's common names!

Phragmipedium kovachii Atwood, Dalstrom, & Fernandez,
2002 (orchid) Named after James Michael Kovach, who brought the
orchid to scientists to identify. But Kovach allegedly imported it
from Peru in violation of the Endangered Species Act. In 2004 he was
sentenced to two years probation and a $1000 fine. Taxonomists hope
to change the orchid's name.

Pithecanthropus Perhaps the only name given
to an animal before it was discovered. In the nineteenth century, it
was believed that an upright stance evolved in humans before a large
brain. With no physical evidence, German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel
reconstructed an upright, speechless, small-brained 'missing-link' and
dubbed it Pithecanthropus alalus. When Eugene Du bois discovered
Java Man in the 1890's, he adopted Haeckel's generic name but he gave it
the new specific designation Pithecanthropus erectus.
P. erectus is now included under our own genus as Homo
erectus.

Plethodon welleri Walker, 1931 (Weller's
salamander) In 1930 Worth Hamilton Weller discovered the salamander
which would be named after him, on Grandfather Mountain, North
Carolina. On a collecting trip to collect more specimens, just one
week after he graduated with honors from high school, he left the
others to collect on his own, and he never returned. His body was
found four days later at the base of a cliff; with it was a collecting
bag with specimens of the new species.

Rosa 'Whitfield' (rose cultivar) Comedy
actress June Whitfield commented, "There is a rose named after me.
The catalogue describes it as 'superb for bedding, best up against a
wall."

Sturnella neglecta (Western meadowlark) The
specific epithet reflects the fact that the Lewis and Clark expedition
overlooked this bird, confusing it with the Eastern
meadowlark.

Tillandsia L. (bromeliad) Elias Tilliander
was a student of Linnaeus who was once so "harassed by Neptune" on a
trip across the Gulf of Bothnia that he returned home by land (a journey
of 2000 miles instead of 200) and changed his name to Tillandz, "by
land." The plant cannot tolerate a damp climate.

Zyzyxia (H. Robinson) Strother, 1991
(shrub) In the later stages of revising North American Ecliptinae (a
subtribe of the sunflowers, Heliantheae), John Strother realized that
one species placed in the genus Wedelia differed enough to merit
considering it a separate genus. By that time, however, the monograph
had already been written and was being proofed for publication. The
editor agreed to accept the new genus only if came after all the other
genera, so as to minimize the number of pages which would need to be
altered. The genera were ordered alphabetically, so Strother created
a name which would come after the previously last
genus, Zexmenia. (In the monograph itself, Strother says only
that the name was arbitrarily formed.)

"I don't understand." It is widely held that French
naturalist Pierre Sonnerat mistakenly took the Malagasy exclamation
"look there" (or words to that effect) for the common name of the indri
(a lemur), but Nick Garbutt in "Mammals of Madagascar" (1999) gives
"endrina" as one of the species' native names, and he should probably
know. Also it has been related that the aye-aye (another Madagascan
lemur) was given its name by Sonnerat after he mistook the surprised
cries of the villagers for the animal's name, but this is not generally
accepted. In a similar vein, the word kangaroo is ubiquitously stated as
meaning "I don't understand" (in reply to Captain Cook's "what do you
call that?" query about the creature) or as a garbled repitition of the
first part of the question ("can you tell me...?"), but in 1901 a
Dr. W.E. Roth claimed that the native name around Cookstown, Queensland,
was ganguru. With all three of these its probably a case of believe what
you want to believe!